The Trial

Imagine waking up to find two men arresting you. It remains unclear what you are being charged with. You attempt to gain access to the courts, to find a way to defend yourself (against what, precisely?), to secure a regular trial, yet you are denied all of these things. Statements, encounters, locations, hopes – everything contradicts itself, remains diffuse, unpredictable, and, above all, impenetrable.

What sounds like a grotesque nightmare was captured by Franz Kafka in his unfinished 1915 novel "The Trial" and describes exactly what happens to the protagonist, Josef K. But is this about the lack of transparency and arbitrariness of a state and its bureaucratic absurdities, or about questions of one’s own guilt and isolation in a cold world? The attempt to submit to a system that no longer follows any comprehensible logic, through pre-emptive obedience, gradually becomes an impossible tightrope walk for Josef K.. A tightrope walk in which every encounter is, above all, an unpredictable encounter with oneself.